"The · darkest · thing · about · Africa · has · always · been · our · ignorance · of · it"

Since, as you can tell by now, I spend a lot of time playing with my host siblings, I thought it would be fun to have a game I could play with them that would be educational as well. So I put it on my wishlist, and pretty soon, my grandma had sent me Chutes & Ladders. (Thanks Grandma!) Shortly after receiving it, I informed Mama (age 11ish), the unofficial head of the kids, that I had a new toy when they were ready to try it out. So Mama, Aja (age 3), Ajandi (age 9ish), and Mohammodou (age 7ish) came in my house and I pulled it out. Each piece was in the shape of a child, so I told them the little Asian girl was Aja Demba (my Taiwanese-American PCV sitemate, who they know well), the little blond girl was me, the little red-haired boy was Ansoumana Dembale (another PCV sitemate in the area), and the little black boy was Mohammodou. Then I let them each pick a person. Aja, the youngest, quickly got bored and confused, so she left and I took over her piece. But as we played, I could not believe how complicated Chutes & Ladders is! I honestly don’t remember it being this complicated growing up, but our first game was fraught with difficulties: they couldn’t flick the spinner properly to get it to spin, they couldn’t understand why you didn’t climb up chutes or fall down ladders, they could never figure out which direction to move their piece, and they were always knocking each other’s pieces over when they counted out their move. They did, however, quickly master counting to 6! After the first tiring, agonizingly long round was over and they left, I rethought the game. I’ve found that some things that we take for granted in child development must actually be a by-product of culture. Hand an American child a crayon and tell them to draw something and they’re off and running. Even if it’s a bunch of indistinguishable scribbles, they’ll tell you it’s a family portrait. Gambian children do not do that. I’ve never succeeded in getting a kid here to draw anything—they’ll only color in coloring books, where the picture is already there (unless they are so young that they just sort of scribble randomly on anything you hand them, which still isn’t deliberate drawing). I guess board games are similar, which is why a game suitable for a 3-year-old American child totally confounds an 11-year-old Gambian.

But I was determined not to give up, so I gave Chutes and Ladders a makeover. First, I outlined all the squares in permanent black marker—the faint lines between white and light blue squares didn’t register with my host siblings, who were forever setting their pieces right on the lines between 2 or 4 squares and then leaving me to try to remember which of the squares they were actually on. (Now I can tell them, “don’t leave your piece there on the line.”) Then I circled all the bottoms of ladders and tops of chutes, in attempt to say “DO SOMETHING FROM THIS SQUARE”. Then I drew arrows to indicate what direction to move, since the path zigzags up the rows from bottom to top and it’s easy to forget (especially in my dimly lit hut where it’s hard to see the numbers in the squares) which direction to move in which row. I drew attention-getting lines all around the final square, to indicate it as the big exciting place that determines the winner. Finally, I nixed the big cardboard multi-racial children pieces, substituting instead some small “learn to count” plastic farm animal pieces Grandma had sent in the same package. The pieces are smaller and easier to jump over when counting, eliminating the knocking-each-other-over and two-pieces-sharing-one-square problems. The next day, we tried Chutes and Ladders again.

My host siblings (minus Aja, who I’d decided was too young for the game, age 3 or not, which is fine because she wasn’t interested anymore) first remarked at all the changes. They wanted the other pieces back so they could be one of the characters again, but they were excited when they saw the farm animals. For the next several games, I was always the dog (though Gambian tolerance for dogs falls way outside fundamental Islam, there is a hesitance still), while their favorites were the horse and chicken. Over the next several games, with the help of my drawn-on additions, they caught on quickly and began helping each other when there was a problem. Now, we play Chutes and Ladders almost daily (always with the farm animals), they flick that spinner with ease, and I often end up being the pig or the rooster, since the dog’s usually taken. :)